Life in the Islamic State: Women can’t leave home without male guardian

Women can’t leave home without a male guardian, accused thieves have their hands amputated, women are stoned to death for adultery, shops close five times a day for prayer. In short, the Islamic State looks just like Sharia Arabia, another Sharia state, and just like Iran, yet another Sharia state. How can this be? After all, the renowned scholar of Sharia Reza Aslan has said: “There’s really no such thing as just Sharia, it’s not one monolithic Continuum – Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it’s understood in many different ways…”

Where are the different ways? Where are the other kinds of Sharia? Everywhere we see it implemented around the world today, it is the same — and the same as it has been everywhere for 1,400 years.

“Islamic State Entrenched in Syrian City as Obama Weighs Steps,” by Donna Abu-Nasr, Bloomberg, August 28, 2014:

In the Syrian city of Raqqah on the banks of the Euphrates River, Islamic State militants are busy building a capital fit for their followers.

Human rights observers say they have stoned women to death for adultery, while residents report that religious textbooks have been imported for schools and the market flooded with black cloaks for girls as young as 6 years old. Even as it wages war on multiple fronts, the group has had time to focus on the details, recruit thousands into its forces and celebrate victories by parading the heads of its enemies.

It’s a reflection of how entrenched the group has become in Syria and how difficult it will be to uproot it from the country where it was able to assemble and train enough forces to push into Iraq in June. U.S. airstrikes alone won’t do it and the international community doesn’t have any other options to fall back on, Kamran Bokhari, vice-president for the Middle East at Texas-based consulting firm Stratfor, said from Toronto.
Video: Does Islamic State Have Grip on Middle East?

“Who’s the other force that’s going to fight the Islamic State on the ground?” said Bokhari. “Its presence in Iraq is based on its strategic depth in Syria and to truly eliminate the threat from Iraq you have to weaken it in Syria.”

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes this month against the Islamist militants in Iraq, though he hasn’t approved action against the group inside Syria.
Assad Offer

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which has said that its three-year civil war has been against foreign-backed terrorists rather than freedom-seeking protesters, offered to cooperate in the fight against the extremists.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said on Aug. 25 any counter-terrorism effort must be done in coordination with the Syrian government, a demand that White House press secretary Josh Earnest has dismissed.

French President Francois Hollande said Assad can’t be an ally in the battle against terror. Assad is an “objective ally” of the Islamic State, Hollande told French ambassadors in Paris.

The U.S. is aiming to tackle the Islamic State without helping the Assad regime, though that may prove difficult, according to Michael Desch, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
Splinter Group

“This is a circle that can’t be squared,” Desch said by e-mail. “In both Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and now Assad’s Syria we tried to overthrow brutal dictators only to find that their replacements were even worse.” Islamic State “is far more of a threat than Assad and if attacking the former bolsters the latter, so be it,” he said.

The Islamic State, which evolved from the al-Qaeda in Iraq, appeared in Syria two years after the anti-Assad uprising began, emerging in April 2013 following its break from the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front.

Initially called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and known as ISIL or ISIS, it made its first statement from Raqqah in May 2013 with the public execution of three civilians wrongly accused of being army officers. They were Alawites, the branch of Shiite Islam that Assad belongs to.
Too Afraid

Mohammad, a Raqqah resident who declined to give his full name because of fear of reprisals, said people are unhappy with the strict social codes imposed by the Islamic State.

Women cannot leave home without a male guardian, shops have to close five times for prayer and people accused of theft have their hands cut off in public, he said. “People yearn for the pre-war days,” he said after arriving in Beirut. “But they’re too intimidated to speak out.”

The Islamic State yesterday killed dozens of Syrian soldiers it captured after seizing the Tabaqa military airport in Raqqah province this weekend, Rami Abdurrahman, head of the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said by phone. The observatory put the number of executions at more than 120.

A video posted online by the Unified Media Center of Raqqah showed more than 100 men in the custody of Islamic State militants forced to march in their underwear at gunpoint.

The Sunni group fought other rebels, wresting control of large areas that stretch from northern Syria to the border with Iraq in the east and killing about 2,700 fighters from other anti-Assad groups, according to the observatory.

The ISIS action is a display of everything that has been said about Islam – women are kept at home – because Islam allows men to rape any woman – he deems unIslamic. It’s rape as a weapon of war – with the non-believer.

But also presents a gaping hole in their image – the Islamic woman as the virtuous [ultra] modest example – while conversely their men have the right to rape / sexually assault – all other women not protected in the same way.

Let them all kill each other.
I don’t think that ISIS is such a threat either way. such an extremist government will fall apart, fight between themselves, and you can’t run a country with such laws. So I think the main problem with ISIS is how they are treating non-muslims in their countries. otherwise, I don’t see them as a major threat.

ISIS, ISIL, now IS has already existed for four years. They recruit from Sunni Islam, or about 80% of over a billion Muslims. In a recent French poll they garnered 15% support for their actions, or about the Muslim percentage in the general population within the margin of error. A similar poll in Saudi Arabia hit 92%.

If I had ten bucks for every “IS will fall apart” commentary I’ve read which was immediately proven wrong by major victory or another recruiting milestone, I’d be a rich man. If draconian sharia caused nations or kingdoms to fall apart, Iran and Saudi Arabia should have gone decades and centuries ago respectively.

Of course IS could be toppled by a competing caliph or internecine struggles, but there have been exactly zero Muslim forces willing to stand and fight them toe-to-toe excluding the Kurdish peshmerga and the best trained Iraqi special forces, almost certainly Shia. Hoping for a turf war which has shown no signs of erupting is not something I would rely on.

The true test is when a majority Sunni army is sent to face the IS like the Saudis, Turks, or Jordanians. I will be very interested in the outcome. I fear that a devout Sunni military will defect in numbers to their caliph as a result of Islamic piety and their historical reverence for the restoration of the caliphate.

The Muslim Brotherhood under Hassan al Banna back in the 1920s was formed largely in response to the end of the Ottoman Caliphate. Political Islam in modern times is very much focused on getting back to the true, not peaceful, days of offensive jihad under the early caliphs through the Ottoman caliphs.

I guess we’ll see. Obama has no strategy and but two potential allies, the UK and Australia (God bless ’em). Nobody else has any immediate plans to take on the IS in a significant way excluding the peshmerga up around northern what-used-to-be Iraq and Assad’s reeling military.

All jihadis act like gangs fighting over turf, I guess in part because that’s exactly what they are. As Islam has no mechanism for peacefully acquiring or transferring power, violence is the norm. The problem is, from our perspective, that IS always mops the floor with competing jihadis. The IS has clashed with al Nusra (al Qaeda) and the FSA (Obama and McCain’s guys) who are Sunnis. So I don’t mean to imply there is complete unanimity within Sunni Islam. Moreover, as the caliph claims to rule all Muslims he creates instability and fear in all Muslim rulers as a challenge to their legitimacy.

In sum, even if Abu Bakr al Baghdadi is toppled by competing jihadis or another contender to caliph, the problem in all likelihood just changes faces. No devout Muslim really contests the validity of _a_ caliph, certainly historically, but they do struggle mightily, both now and in history, over who gets to be caliph.

Aisha was sentenced to house arrest by Ali for her warring against him…Death by house arrest only takes a week or so, since no one said anything about bringing the woman food and water. Allah thinks of everything…

Whilst this is tragic for the victims of the IS, it is a wake up call for all those in the West who have been clinging to PC and liberalism and telling us that Islam is a ‘peaceful’ religion. In fact in spite of all the evidence people, especially in the Islamic world are still claiming the same thing, even while they remain silent about the atrocities! Well, when fascism was on the rise in Europe there were also people claiming it was a force for good. People always cling to their delusions to the last breath. Now people can see with their own eyes what the establishment of an Islamic hegemony is like. Just like the Nazis, the more power they get the more they abuse it.
Even in Iran things were much more liberal before the Revolution. once the Islamists get control freedom dies.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government three-year civil war has been against foreign-backed terrorists offered to cooperate in the fight against the extremists — said any counter-terrorism effort must be done in coordination with the Syrian government, a demand that White House dismissed.

French President Francois Hollande said Assad can’t be an ally in the battle against terror. Assad is an “objective ally” of the Islamic State.

The hands of the American and French Presidents are stained with the blood of innocents. American, French and British leaders trained muslim terrorists including ISIS to wage war against the Syrian people with the wicked goal of overthrowing Syria’s popular, secular government that protected Christians and other minorities and replace the legitimate government with barbaric terrorists and full sharia law. God will severely punish Western leaders for their great evil.

I personally see IS as a huge threat and not to be underestimated at all. They are savages who are able to attract brutal and blood thirsty people who enjoy torturing and killing others. The Media is helping them to grow by portraying them in a way to attract others to their cause. The world leadership has generally misrepresented Radical Islam and its threat. Only most Israelis understand the real dangers of radical Islam and are falsely portrayed in the media. They are constantly criticized and investigated for fighting against Terrorism. Hamas and IS are very similar. Hamas’ focus is to kill all Jews: as stated in their Charter. They use Palestinians as human shields and execute anyone who they fear is a threat. Journalists fear these militant jihadists. IS targets anyone who is not like them. They are already in the US and the UK and beyond. All US Universities have liberal professors and have been indoctrinating students. Most campuses have Student Muslim Associations which are an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just a matter to time before it hits all of us in the US. IS is a very wealthy terrorist organization: with control over oil wells, etc They rob banks and are moving very quickly through the use of social media. No one is safe anywhere. The sooner we realize the extent of the threat the sooner we can respond. We need to take the threat seriously and reverse our direction before it is too late. The US was not prepared for 9/11 because they minimized the dangers. Today we are less prepared under the direction of Obama.

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